If We Really Thought Mind, Not Money, Was Uppermost . . .

Whenever an American politician finds himself in need of easy applause he mentions the disgrace of American public education. Depending on the circumstances or the mood of the audience, the failure in the nation`s classrooms can be blamed for all our troubles.

The Reagan administration has been playing variations on the themes of ignorance for seven years, and in Iowa recently all the Democratic

presidential candidates agreed that something urgent must be done about the schools. They concluded-unanimously and with very earnest smiles-that nothing was more important to the nation`s existence than the intellectual capacities of its future citizens.

Bruce Babbitt, the former governor of Arizona and the most obscure of the candidates present on the platform, went so far as to say that if he could issue one edict it would be, ``Under penalty of death every parent will have to read to his or her child 15 minutes a night, or else.``

The remark apparently was received in respectful silence. Even in Iowa the audiences for political oratory seem to have lost their delight in the absurd.

The other candidates recommended, as they always do, the profligate spending of money-money and more money, money for teachers, buildings, programs, students, money without end. But money won`t work the hoped-for miracle. The nation has spent countless billions on education with little noticeable effect.

The meager result is, I suspect, precisely what the sponsors intend. Why would the politicians want to confront a citizenry that could read the federal budget, decipher the lies from Washington or ask too many awkward questions?

No matter how many worried authorities complain about the failures of the schools, I doubt that they mean what they say. No other explanation accords with the native American talent for solving problems. We are a people blessed with a genius for large organizational tasks. We know how to build and do things. If we were serious in our pious blathering about the schools-if we believed that mind took precedence over money-our educational system surely would stand as the 8th wonder of the world.

But the nation doesn`t have much use for anything other than a technical education. In the American scheme of things the play of ideas ranks well below the play of a minor league third baseman.

Our error begins with our definition of education as a commodity or a blessed state of being. People talk about education as a material good sold in the intellectual department stores otherwise known as Harvard or Yale or the University of Michigan. They speak of ``the educated citizen`` as if he or she were the member of a very exclusive country club.

But even the phrase, ``educated citizen,`` strikes me as absurd. To the best of my knowledge I have never met such a person, and I conclude that the phrase refers to a mythical figure. I can conceive of a ``self-educating citizen,`` and I have had the good fortune to meet a number of people who can be so described. None of them has had the temerity to proclaim himself educated. Without exception, they conceive of education not as an object or a privilege but as a ceaseless process of learning and re-learning.

Until we give up the notion that an education can be bought as easily as a pair of alligator shoes, we will continue to graduate generations of students who, although more talkative than alligators, remain as poorly informed.